From Text MUDs to Honor of Kings Took 25 Years. AI Has Barely Started.
From Text-Based MUDs to Honor of Kings Took 25 Years — AI Is Just Getting Started
The telnet terminal of 1996 looks almost identical to the Claude Code terminal of 2026. In those 25 years, we saw Kingdom of Kings, Legend of Mir, World of Warcraft, and Honor of Kings. So what will the AI we see today look like 25 years from now?
1. That Moment Inside the Terminal
I was writing code with Claude Code — typed a sentence in Chinese, and the AI wrote the code.
I stared at the screen — black background, white text, a blinking cursor.
And it hit me: this scene looks almost identical to the MUD terminal of PKU XKX from 1996. That year, a few students at Peking University set up a telnet server in the Physics Building, running a Chinese MUD called "PKU XKX" (PKU Knight-errant). Players connected via telnet, typed commands, read a world described in text. The cursor blinked just like this.
30 years have passed. PKU XKX is still online, and people still log in every day.
Yet the terminal in front of me is writing code based on the Chinese I typed.
The AI we see today might be the MMORPG of 1999.
2. In 25 Years, From a Line of Text to 139 Million People
Let's lay out the timeline across those 25 years.
1996 — PKU XKX launched. Command-line, black background, white text, a world described entirely in words. Hardly anyone could log on — that year, China had only a few hundred thousand internet users.
1999 — Kingdom of Kings, produced in Taiwan, launched. The first large-scale graphical MMORPG for the Chinese-speaking world (mainland players didn't get access until 2000). For the first time, the jianghu had visuals.
2001 — Stone Age landed in the mainland. Cartoonish art style, pet capturing — "cuteness" entered online gaming. In September that same year, Shanda spent $300,000 to license Legend of Mir, which officially launched. The following year, peak concurrent users surpassed 600,000. Internet cafés exploded. The word "Legend" defined an entire MMO era.
2002 — The9 operated the open beta of MU Online. The first MMORPG built around 3D visuals — a top-down, fully 3D-rendered perspective. The graphics were stunning; The9 recouped its investment in two months.
2005 — World of Warcraft's mainland open beta (also operated by The9). The first systematic entry of a top-tier global IP into China. The subscription model put Chinese MMOs on the same track as the rest of the world.
2011 — League of Legends mainland server went live. The MOBA genre took root; China's esports LPL began here.
2015 — Honor of Kings open beta. The pinnacle of mobile game ubiquity.
2019 — Game for Peace launched. The national representative of the battle royale genre.
By today, 2026, Honor of Kings has a global monthly active user base exceeding 260 million, with 139 million daily active users in the mainland alone — more people online simultaneously in one mobile game than the entire Chinese internet population of 1996, multiplied by over a hundred times.
Not a single player sitting in front of Kingdom of Kings in 1999 could have imagined this day.
3. Where AI Stands Now
On January 24, 2023, Karpathy tweeted:
The hottest new programming language is English.
Two months before that tweet, ChatGPT had just launched.
Three years have passed. Today's Claude Code, ChatGPT, Midjourney — they let people use Chinese, English, natural language to drive machines to write code, produce articles, generate images. Before 2022, this was almost unimaginable.
So where does AI stand on that 25-year timeline?
The spot I see: around 1998–1999 on the gaming timeline — when text MUDs had reached their limit and Kingdom of Kings was freshly launched. The graphical dialogue window (ChatGPT, Claude) is like those first-generation graphical MMORPGs — a station, but not the final stop.
We think AI just looks like this: dialogue windows, prompts, responses. Just like people in 1999 thought graphical online games would always look like Kingdom of Kings.
No one that year could picture Honor of Kings in 2026.
So what will the AI we see today look like 25 years from now?
4. In 5 Years, In 10 Years
First, imagine five years from now.
By then, AI won't be a "dialogue window." It'll be a "collaborative partner."
Before you leave the house in the morning, you say to your phone: "Help me prep for this afternoon's proposal." On the way home, you open your phone and see a complete presentation, copy, data sheets, client background research — all laid out. You glance through, tweak two things.
It's not that you break the task into a prompt you feed it. It knows what "proposal" means, who the client is, what project you've been following the last three months. It actively collaborates with you all day, not triggered by you.
It took five years to go from 1999's Kingdom of Kings to 2004's World of Warcraft. From today's Claude Code to that "proactive AI partner" — probably also five years.
Now imagine ten years from now.
AI steps out of the screen and into the physical world.
This is already on the way. Waymo's autonomous driving, as of February 2026, has accumulated over 200 million miles, completing 500,000 paid trips every week. At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of Atlas: 56 degrees of freedom, lifting 50 kilograms — the first humanoid robot truly entering factory production lines. AlphaFold 3 was released in May 2024; Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year. Drug molecules designed by it are now entering clinical trials.
Ten years from now, what will these numbers become?
The vast majority of vehicles on the road drive themselves. At home, a robot cooks, cleans, keeps the elderly company. On factory floors, humanoid robots tighten screws and move parts for you. New drugs go from design to market in half the time. You talk to an AI assistant, but this assistant controls more than a screen — it dims your lights, summons your car, orders groceries for your fridge.
Natural language is no longer just for computers — it's for the entire physical world.
Share this with that friend who played Legend of Mir, WoW, Honor of Kings alongside you — he understands better than anyone what "how far 25 years can go" means.
Five years is enough to turn a tool into a partner.
5. In 15 Years, In 20 Years
Fifteen years from now, it'll be even more different.
By then, natural language won't just be "instructions." It'll be "thinking together."
Writing a paper — you mutter half an idea into the air in the morning. The AI picks up the other half and says: "What you just said contradicts a judgment you made in that paper three years ago. Want to stop and think about it?" You pause, pour a cup of coffee, start re-examining that thread. When the paper is finished, you can't quite tell — was this part my thinking, and that part its thinking?
Making a product — you're not giving orders to "build X." You and the AI brainstorm together. It offers angles you'd never consider; you make judgments it hasn't encountered. Two different forms of intelligence layered on a shared problem.
The pace of scientific discovery accelerates by multiples. New materials, new molecules, new theories — the time from hypothesis to validation shrinks from years to months, from months to weeks. Biology is no longer a slow discipline.
The feeling might be like two friends in a café, chewing on a thorny problem for three hours — neither can quite say whose idea came first.
And twenty years from now?
I don't know.
Just like people in 1999 couldn't know Honor of Kings. The people typing commands on telnet into PKU XKX in 1996 couldn't know that in 2026, 139 million people would be battling in the same mobile game.
What I can think of are a few questions:
What will children of that era need to learn?
Will "work" still carry the same meaning?
When AI and humans think together, make decisions together — will "I" still be that "I"?
At that point, how will the human species define itself?
I'll leave the question marks here.
The boundary between human and AI will blur — from a terminal, to a room, to the entire world.
6. We're Standing in 1999
Back to the present.
The terminal is still in front of me. Black background, white text, cursor blinking. The cursor on the server in the Physics Building at Peking University 30 years ago looks exactly like the one in Claude Code today.
But in between, there's been Kingdom of Kings, Legend of Mir, WoW, Honor of Kings.
What happens over the next 25 years may be even bigger.
We are standing in 1999 — only this time it's not online games. It's AI.
As an indie developer, I launched an AI product focused on traditional culture this year using Claude Code. Monthly revenue is a few thousand dollars — not huge, but users are actively renewing. Using this tool every day, I often wonder: what will this tool look like in 5 years? In 10 years?
What I picture is everything above.
If you imagine the next 25 years differently, leave a comment and tell me what you see.
If this piece resonates with you, hit "Wow" and share it with that friend who played Legend of Mir, WoW, Honor of Kings alongside you — he understands better than anyone what "how far 25 years can go" means.
See you in the next Awakening Notes.
Publication Log
- WeChat Official Account: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/g3e68sEFX7LjzKseC9gHX-O1LxRSqdHAXqtqYUjIlFL2N_02ysET_Noy3NyuT_Ux (2026-05-05 20:03 draft, scheduled for bulk send on 05-09 20:00)